Sports
Arizona Hires Investigator To Review Hockey Workout, Investigator Discovers Arizona Has Hockey
By Michael Yappaport, . BSN Network. Satire.
TEMPE, Ariz. -- Arizona State University announced this week that it has retained an outside investigator to conduct a formal review of workout practices within its hockey program, confirming that the school has reached the stage of institutional crisis where someone with a clipboard is now the most powerful person in the building.
Head coach Greg Powers was placed on administrative leave earlier in the week. A university spokesperson described the leave as a precautionary measure taken to ensure the integrity of the review process, which is the sentence a communications department produces when nobody can agree on what actually happened but everyone agrees something did.
The investigator has not been publicly named. What is known is that they were hired to examine a hockey workout, which means they are being paid to answer the question: did men in a very cold room do an unreasonable amount of exercise under the supervision of this particular man, and if so, how unreasonable, and compared to what baseline, and who approved the baseline, and is there a form for that.
This is a university that built a Division I hockey program in the desert. That decision alone should have triggered an outside investigation. Instead, Arizona State waited until a workout became a matter of institutional record before bringing in an independent set of eyes, which is the administrative equivalent of ignoring the check engine light for three years and then commissioning a study on why the car is in a ditch.
Greg Powers was nine years into rebuilding a program from nothing in a state where the ground does not freeze. Whatever happened in that weight room, the man spent nearly a decade convincing teenagers from Minnesota that Tempe was a reasonable place to pursue a hockey career. That is either visionary coaching or a hostage situation and the university apparently just now got curious which.
ASU Athletic Director Ray Anderson told reporters the school takes the health and safety of its student athletes extremely seriously, which is the sentence every athletic director has said in the history of every athletic director investigation and which carries approximately the same informational content as a terms of service agreement.
Sources close to the program say players were subjected to demanding conditioning sessions. In college hockey, that sentence describes Tuesday.
The outside investigator is expected to deliver findings within several weeks. Those findings will then be reviewed by university administration, who will use them to make a decision that lawyers have already made, at which point the investigator's report will be cited in a press release and never read again.
Greg Powers could not be reached for comment, presumably because he is sitting in a room somewhere watching tape of a workout he ran while a stranger with a law degree watches the same tape and bills by the hour.
Arizona State has a hockey team. Someone looked into it.
The story we are making fun of: https://frontofficesports.com/article/arizona-state-hockey-independent-investigation/